Unlocking Imaginal Religion — Part 7: Complexio Oppositoria
Bringing It All Together
Once we have realised our reality and ourselves as thoroughly empty, not literally real nor unreal, we find ourselves in the liminal space outside of birth and death, outside of physical law, outside of the City of the Intellect where everything needs to make sense, needs to be explained and defined and understood…
Here in the living desert, the Resurrection occurs. For now God is an image, and so is reality, and so are we…
The symbolic code of the cosmos begins to decode itself — and is consciously rewritten by the humans who take their divinely-ordained place as willing participants the divine theatre…
Now the countless God-images of old may return, illuminated anew by the reality dissolving logic of emptiness and non-reality, neither real nor unreal but totally open, imaginal, ever-unfolding… all miraculous revelations of the holy mystery… and thus continues the infinite evolutionary dance, the magical play of appearances… and in that boundless space of possibility and imagination, the old Gods begin to meet and mingle with the continuous stream of new arrivals emerging from the void bearing all manner of masks, and minds, and melodies…
Now God wears drag and rides a skateboard and graffitis on billboards at midnight… smokes cigarettes and works behind a counter, watches clouds drift by at sunset, writes poems on a notepad, removes all her clothes and slips silently into the waiting sea…
The Imaginal
The imaginal is the bridge between the formless — yet fertile, waiting to be impregnated and fulfilled — archetypal realms, and the densely and intricately formed material spacetime realm in which we live.
The images we encounter within, faces and facets of the imaginal beings who dwell in the imaginal realm, may thus act as the mediators of communication and exchange between us embodied human persons and the transcendent realms of the archetypes, the unifying and universal divine creative intelligence of the Meta-universe (or God, or psyche), creator of countless universes; love-source and life-force of all living beings.
The beings, intelligences and energies of the imaginal are living syntheses of emptiness and form, of the dual and non-dual realms between which they live in an indeterminate space: the boundless, paradoxical and inconceivable space of “not two, not one”. This is also the space of “not self, not other”; it is this ambiguity allows images to be viewed and related to as self, as other, or as neither: as utterly groundless and empty.
With practice any little piece of human experience can be taken, or may autonomously reveal itself, as a God-image, as a living symbol for the psychic and imaginal nature of all things; as an invitation to the infinite divine dance, a doorway to go deeper still into the mystery: to participate with ever-greater aliveness, creativity and responsibility.
We can play and we can dance with our God-images, submitting to the transformative, disturbing and liberating effects of these encounters, all the while seeing image as image: never taking images to be real or as indicative of an underlying reality or truth.
It’s all psyche. Seeing and knowing and creating herself. Or at least it can be, if we choose to let her — the infinite transpersonal intelligence — in, and to know and evolve herself in, and through, and as us. This is equivalently an invitation to see and know and recreate ourselves — in and through and as psyche, the infinite divine creative intelligence.
The imaginal realm is an expanse of infinite possibility and of infinite potential. And thus, so too, are the possible ways of conceiving, imagining and relating to ourselves, and God, or the psyche, as image.
The world of image is a world of “Form, but liquid form. Non-reified form.” (Burbea again). Any form can be seen and sensed imaginally.
Unfabricated to the degree that it is known to be fabricated, but does not disappear completely. Not real, not unreal. Not empty, nor not-empty. That is the realm of sacred perception. Thus we may perceive the world, when sensing with soul. And thus may we perceive ourselves! With identity, but liquid identity. Non-reified identity. Imaginal identity. More on this to come.
The entire world of ordinary reified perception may be liquidised and ushered into this boundless imaginal realm, if we undertake the necessary training in seeing emptiness, seeing non-reality, seeing image as image.
Indeed, Rob described “Eden”, original Abrahamic image of the divine garden, or heavenly paradise on earth, as “every area of perception that has been touched and made sacred by the soulmaking dynamic”. The “abyss” is everywhere that has not yet been touched. BOTH are infinite. Infinite possibilities for samsaric reified perception, and infinite possibilities for imaginal experience, creation, soulmaking.
The imaginal expanse includes the innumerable possibilities for relating to embodied humans as divine, as image, as God-images.
How would it be to know your own face, and the faces of everyone you see and meet with, as living images of the divine psyche, living self-expressions of an infinite and boundless creative love?
Seeing everything as empty enables us to see nothing as real. Seeing nothing as real enables us to see everything as imaginal. And this applies to God (and Goddess, and any number of archetypal Gods with particular qualities or intentions) as much as anything else we can conceive of — or imagine.
The great emptying, non-reifying and subsequent “opening up” of the God-images allows a return to all the Gods of previous stages, only now they are seen and sensed imaginally. Not literally, but as unfathomble, non-real, empty-yet-not-empty images. This “imaginalisation” allows both the ongoing evolution of these God-images (our religious inheritance), and the generation of an unlimited array of new God-images.
It is this new frontier of imaginal, non-literal relationship to the divine (and to oneself) that makes possible the unique and intensely personal religion that I have been exploring throughout these articles. Again I would point you back to Rob Burbea and Catherine McGee’s Soulmaking Dharma as a practical meditative methodology for conceiving, encountering and relating to such images in an embodied and heartfelt way, as they spontaneously come to us from the (collective) unconscious (in other words, from God!). Coupled a conceptual matrix that brings clarity to the realm of human emotions and feelings, which I will introduce in the next chapter, we arrive at a powerful new dynamic for furthering human evolution, by consciously welcoming creative archetypal forces — or Gods — into our everyday human lives. By this activity we may consciously realise the divine and archetypal of these lives; of the worlds and stories that we took to be so real, so ordinary, so unremarkable.
We begin to sense — or is it remember? — the possibility of living in Eden, living as an angel among angels… among mountains and rivers and trees… living and breathing and creating… as a boundless, groundless and yet gloriously embodied and personified being… here and now, on two feet, planted firmly on the rotating GROUND of planet earth, spiralling jewel of the starstrung heavens…
Who’s Looking For Who?
Finding myself and finding God amount to the same thing. In each case, there is nothing to find.
Nothing real, at least.
Just an image, inseparable from voidness.
And yet, there it is: a groundless voidness — appearing as image!
Nothing to capture, understand or conceptualise. Nothing to grasp. Nothing to fix. Nothing to release. Nothing to reject as meaningless nothingness.
An image appears,
neither something nor nothing,
and in that unfathomability and inconceivability,
is of the same nature as the boundless void.
The image embodies and expresses
the nonduality of the immanent and the transcendent,
is the imaginal love-child of the two (not two, not one).
Everythingness and nothingness
are locked
in an eternal co-creative dance
of mutual dependence, mutual emptiness, mutual love.
We can look right through any image, perception or experience — including God-images — as not existing at all. It’s all empty, it’s all non-real. Yet we cannot negate and deny any image, perception or experience as a nothingness. A downright paradox, no doubt, which leaves us grasping for an adequate concept to describe the ontological status (the existence or non-existence) of images (and perceptions and experience). Disturbingly, it leaves us grasping for an adequate concept to describe the ontological status of OURSELVES. This is terrifying, and yet the terror leads us back to where it all began: the infinite voidness. This reconnection with the infinite gives us a chance to see our emptiness and so to recreate ourselves (and our world and lives) ad infinitum. If we stop grasping for an adequate concept to describe the nature of things (perhaps by settling for an consciously incomplete and inadequate “holder concept”, such as “inconceivability”) well, we then have the possibility of exiting the endless cycle of mental grasping for a final definition of “what things are”.
Finally: an imaginal doorway opens, and we sense the possibility of leaving behind the endless futile attempts to find an ultimate description and definition of our ontological status — which is an utterly groundless conceptually-created game (or mind-loop) to begin with! Letting the loop run its course until it runs out of energy, much like the ourouborous circling in pursuit of its own tail, is akin to pulling that tail out of the snake’s mouth and letting it run free into the boundless blossoming garden all around it. We stop eating ourselves alive (by our constant mental self-inquiry, like looking in a mirror ) and slither away into the forest.
Sometimes we need to eat ourselves. How else could we know what we taste like and adjust our inner make-up accordingly? Then we know what we are feeding to the world (who is going to eat us up, sooner or later — and that’s okay!). We are learning that modern culture’s paranoic self-obsession with defining and conceptualising ourselves does not have to be NEARLY as dominant a feature of our experience as it currently is. I believe that this neurotic and existential self-obsession will die down, as increasing numbers of us awaken to our self-created and self-sufficient nature, to our imaginality and non-reality and emptiness and thus our freedom to define and conceptualise ourselves in any way we please. Then we are freed from the quest to finally FIND OUT who and what we are and may enter into conscious and responsible participation in the ongoing evolutionary adventure of creating, recreating, and destroying ourselves. Without limit.
Our very being here, embodied on earth, is evidence that as divine souls we clearly wish to experience all of it, to transform freely and infinitely in search of Beauty. This wish is God’s wish. Because — you guessed it — we are God! Walking, talking, smoking, wondering about the world we’ve created, before wondering gets old and wandering gets enticing again… the wild starts calling, ancient voices stir our dreams and icy winds begin to spiral at the mountaintops of the mind…
We human persons are just as valid and legitimate revelations of the divine psyche as any classical or conventional God-image. Every human person is an evolving living, present, breathing image of the living whole… it is simply far more intense and painful and often heartbreaking to relate to human beings as images of the divine whole, than it is to relate to a static and silent wooden figure of a man who died a very long time ago in a foreign land. Our failure to recognise our empty, divine and imaginal nature sends us into spirals of suffering. And yet, if we are one with infinite psyche, emerging from that psyche as it emerges from us, then all of this suffering is voluntary and intentional and is contributing to the great evolutionary project that is underway here, in and as this living cosmos… it’s all learning…
Being All Beings
It is possible to experience yourself as all beings. But only if you are open to all beings experiencing themselves as YOU. The total vulnerability and honesty of this opening is what dissolves any last remnants of a self-serving ego and incurs the birth of the selfless self: the initiated adult ego whose essence and natural action is universally beneficial service (because the adult identity is, though liquid, empty, imaginal and therefore infinite in its appearances, keenly and radiantly aware of its own inseparability and indistinguishability from all beings). In this ego-state the personal psyche is gloriously and painfully conscious of its total congruence with the transpersonal psyche. As as a result of this, the evolution of the personal psyche is known to be inseparable from the evolution of the collective psyche at the species, planetary, cosmic and multi-cosmic levels. What was once understood as a path of “my awakening, my evolution” becomes dissolved and recontextualised within — or actually AS — the awakening and evolution of the entire infinite community of divine imaginal souls, who together form the unified consciousness of the One (the super-soul, God, psyche). And please tell me, if this continual switching and cross-referencing of different views and God-labels is giving you a headache. I don’t think it is necessary to be quite this trigger-happy with view-switching or identity-shifting in everyday life, but the exercising of this muscle by the reading this text is intended to increase the flexibility, fluidity and pliability with which you can navigate your own evolutionary journey.
God one moment, human the next. A minute later, blissful and terrifying nothingness: ready to create. And pop! A new divine imaginal identity spun straight from the fertile void: let’s say the mythical power-writer of ancient ancestral poetry, who is needed at a modern culture feast-of-excess to stand and speak as a voice for the voiceless earth and the long-forgotten ancestors. Fierce love embodied and expressed in a cascade of magically improvised evolutionary poetry. Finished with her awakening fire, she sits down. Dissolves back into the love of the cosmic Goddess. Dead again. And ready for anything.
If there is separation (or individuation) it is imaginal and consciously fabricated. The human person can know themselves to be utterly empty, non-real, free — and responsible for all phenomena arising in and as continuous creation. Just so, if there is a unity with (or of) all beings, this is also imaginal. It is simply another possible view, or way of seeing and knowing a self. Only in this case the self is the universal “being-who-is-all-beings”. This is itself yet another self-knowing and self-created (God-)image of the psyche.
Neither separation nor unity is primary, fundamental or true.
This is the “via negativa”.
The positive view — or image — might read something like:
We are a groundless oneness — of boundless diversity!
If this God-image is a “Complexio Oppositorium” then the doorway is open to a conscious embrace of, and identification with, all living beings; the infinite boundless wholeness of the divine creative psyche. So, let’s take a look at this concept, this archetypal formula for images of divine wholeness.
Getting (W)holier
Crucially, we want to move beyond the era of relating to God-images that are all light, all good, all love. Because if they are, then we can be quite certain that we are repressing, ignoring or rejecting the shadow and that we — and the Gods we serve — are going to become extremely one-sided.
The rejection of certain qualities of our nature (and the nature of God) is the very mechanism that keeps these qualities in the unconscious — allowing shadow patterns to play out, harming ourselves and others. This is a dangerous game!
If our God-image doesn’t encompass and embrace evil — the full extent of suffering, violence and darkness here on Earth today — then neither will our self-image, allowing us to unconsciously propagate that very same suffering, violence and evil.
Christianity has historically neglected the shadow by revering Jesus (who symbolises and embodies light) exclusively, and by banishing Satan, the supposed source of suffering and evil, to the underworld. This banishment allowed unconscious shadow patterns to dominate the life of the Church and essentially hijack the whole enterprise — resulting in patriarchal, abusive, money-hoarding and often extremely violent institutions. Institutions that actually repressed and were threatened by mystical experiences in the likeness of Jesus’. It’s a cruel irony that things got so twisted, so far from the original heart-impulse of the compassionate Nazarene prophet. And it all comes down to a one-sided God-image… a God-image which is not a Complexio Oppositorium. Or at least, was not conceived of and related to a such, by the vast majority of Christians.
Again that line from Jung: “you become the God you worship”.
If people followed the collective unconscious / transpersonal psyche as it revealed itself to them — uniquely and individually speaking to their soul, heart and imagination — then they could have developed intimate relationships with their personal God(-image)s. If they did, then they would not have been seduced or coerced by the God-images that the church was ramming down everyone’s throats (in order to gain power). The same goes for all institutionalised religions who push one God-image exclusively, and proclaim that all others a heresy.
Connecting with internal God-images (and angels, archetypal forces, and other imaginal figures) is what the Gnostics and the Pagans were doing, out in the desert and in the forests. aAnd so the Church hunted them down and deleted their God-images. At best they were driven into hiding.
I actually remember this. It came up in a particularly intense emotional healing process that brought me into memories from a past life (this begins to happen, once you do enough processes and you start contacting emotional material from past-life events that you are still carrying in your emotional and energetic bodies). I was discovered at an underground meeting of Christians, taken prisoner and subsequently executed by Roman soldiers. I have been carrying a fear of “being discovered” and violently attacked ever since, even in this current, relatively safe and peaceful lifetime. I concluded, way back then, that it is not safe to be loud or vocal about one’s beliefs, and I can see how this has made me especially careful about talking openly about spiritual matters with people. Happily I can say that this particular fear is no longer with me. Emotional healing processes WORK.
A God-image that represents “the Good” exclusively will lead a person to create a similarly one-sided self-image, leaving psyche’s dark and evil aspects exactly where they want to be: concealed in the unconscious and free to wreak havoc. This allows you to launch murderous crusades against your heretical brothers and sisters (the Dark) in the name of Christ (the Light), fully convinced that you are working for the forces of good. It’s terrifying how convincing — and how deadly — this psychic mechanism can be once it gets a hold of people. Millions of people have died because of these one-sided God-images. Entire cultures have been wiped from the Earth. It is a sickening reminder of the power of God-images and the need for them to be truly alive for people in a personally transformative, soulmaking and evolutionary way: truly and effectively acting as portals to the imaginal, and to the boundless wholeness of the psyche, both in its personal and transpersonal aspects.
The healthy, whole and healing path is that our God-image will lead us to a “union of opposites”: a reconciliation of good and evil and ultimately a transcendence of any duality between the two. Jung called this revelation the Complexio Oppositorium and posited it as the resolution to the problem of psychic fragmentation. It is essentially an archetypal God-image, a symbol for psychic wholeness and totality which will assume a unique form for each unique soul.
It appears as a personal revelation of the universal divine mystery, of the wholeness and boundlessness of the divine creative intelligence — which is of course the very same wholeness and boundlessness of the human person receiving the revelation! This revelation is reconnection of the limited human identity with the a) the imaginative-creative source of all identity b) the limitless possibility for alternative imaginal identities and the c) transparency and non-reality of all identities.
In one’s true God, all is balanced: all forms and qualities finds their opposite, on which their existence and appearance depends. And since God and the transpersonal Self are practically indistinguishable (as images), we come to know the Self, the infinite divine psyche in its utterly wild array of manifestations, as a seamless whole. A Complexio Oppositorium.
In psyche’s wholeness, all contradictory opposites are unified and are revealed to be a) mutually dependent (one cannot appear or arise without the other), b) mutually empty (not real, nor unreal, nor both, nor neither) and therefore c) potentially imaginal — potentially re-conceivable as mystical, unfathomable, magical, wondrous and sacred.
The ego is a tiny portion of this infinite imaginal expanse, and can realise itself as such. The ego holds in consciousness certain poles of certain dualities (such as “I am female, I am good, I am alive”) in order to have a certain self-experience, or embodied incarnation. The opposing poles are kept in the unconscious. The self-experience may be beautiful or ugly. When the experiencing self wants to return to wholeness, they must release their identification with the specific poles of specific dualities and return to an image of — and identification with — wholeness. A return to God, or to the Self (which again is a union of all possible opposites, and contains both the personal and transpersonal psyche).
A conscious return to wholeness delivers an incarnated soul from ego-centricity to the God-centered ecstasy, servitude and humility of the embodied divine human. Yet incredibly (and incomprehensibly), we can continue in our embodiment while remaining aware of our identity with the infinite whole of the Self / psyche! This is the conscious birth of the soul within spacetime, within matter, within the human body. The ongoing refinement and finessing of this soul is the ongoing evolutionary work of divine incarnation…. the “progressive incarnation of the deity” that is occurring within every single ego, every single living being…
In consciously relating to a Complexio Oppositorium, a God-image, all human pain, suffering, and violence can find redemption and retribution, because they can now be re-contextualised within the expanse of psyche’s wholeness. For example: all suffering can be seen and related to as meaningful and necessary when touched by the God-image of a divine cosmic intelligence, or Goddess, who voluntarily chooses to suffer unimaginably by incarnating as countless living beings, some of them humans, in order to learn, evolve and create.
Okay, big talk, seeing all suffering as meaningful etc etc… how does this actually play out in one’s life?
It all begins with consciousness of injustice and suffering. Consciousness of unconsciousness, if you will. This is what activates the “compensatory function of the unconscious” by which the ego, having becoming too one-sided (identified with one pole of an opposing pair, such as good) will constellate an activation of the opposite pole within the unconscious.
The key insight here is that the intervention of consciousness has a ‘balancing’ effect on the unconscious.
- Injustice, consciously perceived, constellates justice.
- Suffering, consciously perceived, constellates compassion (a movement to heal and assuage that suffering).
This balancing only happens when we choose to bring consciousness to the unconscious. (Sometimes the unconscious will crash into our awareness with terrifying and disturbing psychic material, but still we have a choice over whether to go numb and deny what is happening, or to see it and feel it.) Nobody can do this for us. Nobody can stop us from doing it. Becoming conscious of the suffering bound up in the unconscious gives us a choice over whether or not to feed this suffering, or choose something else.
This choice is the precise point at which evolution once again progresses, novelty enters, and creation is renewed. It is the moment of reconnection; indeed, the moment of religion. Conscious suffering changes the shape (or form, or structure) of our being, our identity, our person. In turn, this changes the shape of the transpersonal collective psyche.
We have an effect on God, and God has an effect on us.
This is true for every moment that we are conscious!
The next piece will dive right into this theme. Until then, ye mighty explorers!
